BOOKS BACK TO BASICS How Gerard Manley Hopkins remade English poetry. BY ADAM KIRSCH Å r -T--" 1, \, ê' ", \ ,', - ____."I't.. : '- " . . >,i . ( ,-' ,../ ......-. J ,- 1 -: ;I ,.. "', . .....:., ./ "I I ' \ / ' L . / . -.... / I/' I :- . ;f(:c': " '1 1 , 1 ' ' J, ...., ," .". _'U" .... . f,ll ' ::;;' jr1r !IJf I" }/i, i 111 II A\. 'II 1\/ J ,, I :j / . J ,,' jI' , I ':'d "'. '.; " _' ','A" '" ,,'I', \" ,: é" 5'::=' -:, j' '' J . 11;, ," ',I, " \, , '. ., . '"7:' :._." ' .'. II: . ' . _ j\ ,. \r.-:;: A.. " . -,, "'-'< -;-- "," ,...,...... . '._ :$. .- '-',,-,,- - - E nglish poetry began with a vision of God. Caedmon, the first English poet whose name we know-he lived in the seventh century, in the town of Whitby-was not a poet by training. He knew so little about the art, in fact, that at parties, when guests played the popular game of improvising verses to the harp, he would always slip away and go home. After one such party, the Venerable Bede recounts, Caedmon went to the stables and fell asleep among the horses. He dreamed that a man ap- peared to him, demanding, "Caedmon, sing me something." When he pro- / '.I . I t I n . I :- . ''c- " -.. ..;:". /' 1/' ' , 1'.... ' . . ./ \ ,,/ ..., (/,. J.Þ- - _ --- " " . .... tested that he didn't know how, the di- vine messenger insisted, "Nevertheless, you must sing," and gave him a subject: "Sing about the Creation." Instantly, he began to recite, in the alliterative, heav- ily stressed lines of Anglo- Saxon verse, the hymn now recognized as the first surviving English poem: "Nowwe must praise heaven - kingdom's Guardian, / the Measurer's might and his mind- plans,/the work of the Glory-Father, when he of wonders of every one, / eter- nal Lord, the beginning established." Modern English poetry, many read- ers have felt, is virtually a different art Hopkins's faith made him almost masochistically ambivalent about his writing. from the one practiced by Caedmon and his glorious successors over the next thousand years. Starting around the turn of the twentieth century, poets seemed to break with all the traditions of English verse, reclaiming poetry as a new genre for an utterly transformed world. Yet the origins of modern poetry can be traced to a revelation strangely parallel to Caedmon's-the sudden in- spiration of a devoted Christian, who emerged from long silence to sing a masterpiece to the Creator. For Gerard Manley Hopkins, how- ever, the divine calling came not in a dream in a stable but from an article in the Times of London-the first of many signs that the modern poet's vision would be more ambiguous, and much less happy, than that of the me- dieval scop. On December 8, 1875, Hopkins read the newspaper's account of a shipwreck off the coast of Kent. The Deutschland, a steamer carrying emigrants from Bremen to New York, had run aground in a storm, and more than fifty of its passengers and crew were drowned. Hopkins, who was in Wales studying theology as part of his nine-year training to become a Jesuit priest, was especially struck by the detail that five of the dead were Franciscan nuns-exiles from imperial Germany, where Bismarck was prose- cuting his Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church. In his new biography, "Gerard Man- ley Hopkins" (Viking; $34.95), Paul Mariani quotes the Times' terrible description of their final hours: "Five German nuns . . . clasped hands and were drowned together, the chief sis- ter, a gaunt woman 6 ft. high, calling out loudly and often '0 Christ, come quickly!' till the end came. The shrieks and sobbing of women and children are described by the survivors as agonizing." Hopkins "was affected by the account," he told a friend years later, "and hap- pening to say so to my rector he said that he wished someone would write a poem on the subject. On this hint I set to work and, though my hand was out at first, produced one." Although Hopkins had been devoted to poetry during his years at Oxford, he had written almost nothing in the pre- vious seven years, having sworn off po- >: etrywhen he decided to become aJesuit. ð